What is it about?
Spanish verbs have morphemes that encode tense (past perfect and imperfect, for example) and mood (indicative and subjunctive). In certain combinations, these grammatical units lead to inferences about the source of information that the speaker of an utterance attributes its content to, that is, evidentiality. This article examines and reports original data on how learners of Spanish as a foreign language cope with the understanding of such verbal morphology and the evidential effects it can create on interpretation. Despite the complexity, and the lack of explicit instruction, learners do make progress in understanding these effects.
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Why is it important?
Evidentiality is a field of meaning closely related to modality, and has been studied in a very wide range of world languages. The description of how evidentiality is conveyed in Spanish is still incomplete, but in this paper we describe some aspects of how evidential meaning arises through inferential processes in utterance interpretation. At the same time, we examine how these combinations of tense and mood within certain sentential or discourse contexts are dealt with by learners of Spanish as they develop their command of the intricacies of Spanish grammer.
Perspectives
This article arose through a conference on Evidentiality in Madrid, at which Professor Bert Cornelie organised an exciting panel on the semantics and pragmatics of evidentiality and epistemic modality. It was a very rewarding meeting that gave us the opportunity to interact with colleagues who share the interest in the semantic-pragmatic perspective of evidentiality. I think it presents original ideas about the way Spanish grammatical units combine to convey this kind of meaning, from the point of view of a broad view of verbal communication, namely that of Relevance Theory.
Dr Aoife Kathleen Ahern
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Metarepresentation and evidentiality in Spanish tense and mood, Belgian Journal of Linguistics, December 2015, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/bjl.29.03ahe.
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